seriously, the fiery hell and God's vindictiveness at any neglect,
as though they were as much a matter of fact as Bladden's iron-works
and Rawdon's pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung
them out of my mind again.

Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, "take
notice" of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left
school, and with the best intentions in the world and to anticipate
the poison of the times, he had lent me Burble's "Scepticism
Answered," and drawn my attention to the library of the Institute
in Clayton.

The excellent Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from
his answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy
and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had
hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor
one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the
Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works
of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was
soon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's Christian
Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told
me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he was "a
Socialist out and out." He lent me several copies of a periodical
with the clamant title of The Clarion, which was just taking up a
crusade against the accepted religion. The adolescent years of any
fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily
open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new
ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly. Doubt,
I say, but it was not so much doubt--which is a complex thing--as
startled emphatic denial. "Have I believed THIS!" And I was also,